The Nutcracker at the Coliseum - review

In its fourth year, Wayne Eagling's version of our favourite Christmas ballet is still fresh and vital

Daria Klimentova and Junor Souza star in this production of the traditional Nutcracker show [PH]

Now in its fourth year, Wayne Eagling’s version of the season’s most popular ballet looks as fresh and vital as when it first hit the stage.

While he has refined some of the more bewildering narrative, there remains some confusion, although one might put this down to Hoffmann’s original tale which is beyond bonkers.

He sets the scene well with little Clara (Micaela Infante) and her big sister Louise (Ksenia Ovsyanick) putting on their Christmas party frocks while pesky brother Freddie (Matthew Cotton) interrupts their preparations with a clockwork mouse.

With a nod to Ashton’s Les Patineurs, skaters on the frozen river whizz back and forth with various degrees of expertise.

Eagling shifts the focus away from the adults to the children who dominate the opening scene, gleefully receiving their presents and sitting entranced by Dr Drosselmeyer’s (Fabian Reimair) puppet theatre before exploding in a flurry of activity as the sword-wielding boys run amok through the dolly-cuddling girls – a preface for the Mice versus Soldiers battle.

A fresh reworking of this Christmas classic is as vital as ever [ARNAUD STEPHENSON]

The Freudian implications of The Mouse King (James Streeter) climbing through Clara’s bedroom window notwithstanding, the nightmare image is part of the ballet’s carefully woven fabric.

While he doesn’t improve on Petipa and Ivanov’s surviving choreography and plays fast and loose with Tchaikovsky’s score, Eagling brings a wealth of detail to the stage, peppering it with incidental episodes such as Louise’s pursuit by a trio of suitors and Clara’s prepubescent yearning for Drosselmeyer’s Nephew (Vadim Muntagirov).

As the grown-up Clara (how did that happen?) Daria Klimentová is wonderful, creating the illusion of fresh-faced adolescence through crisp, precise footwork and swooning upper body movement. Theirs is now a partnership that is very hard to beat on any stage and one dreads the day she finally hangs up her pointe shoes.

Although I still find it hard to work out why Nephew and Nutcracker (Junor Souza) are both the same and yet different entities, this might be excused by the notion that the entire ballet is a product of Clara’s overheated imagination, controlled by Drosselmeyer.

But the good stuff pushes confusion aside: Infante’s outstanding solo around her Nutcracker doll, Yonah Acosta channelling his inner Antonio Banderas for the Spanish Dance and Ovsyanick leaping from Louise to Snowflake to Mirliton with gazelle-like agility.

VERDICT: 4/5

The English National Ballet's Nutcracker at the London Coliseum (020 7845 9300) until January 5. For tickets visit expresstheatretickets.co.uk